Shigeru Miyamoto

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There have been a lot of rumblings about Nintendo in the press lately, but last night's investor briefing finally brought everyone some rumblings from Nintendo, and it was pretty good news. They laid out their plans for the coming year, and while they're stuck with the Wii U for now, they've got a few solid ideas for how to turn things around.

It's like some kind of Shigeru Miyamoto cosplay situation.

Shigeru Miyamoto is responsible for many of the most iconic video game characters ever. He gave us a lot, and artist Butcher Billy wanted to give something back. That's why Billy made these beautiful images of Miyamoto as some of his most beloved characters. Check them out, they're really something special.

You're welcome, Internet.

It's Game Week over at Late Night With Jimmy Fallon, and since Fallon has basically the best back-up band ever in The Roots, he used their unique talents to answer an audience request for lyrics to the Super Mario Brothers theme song. As you can see, it was a great success -- Tariq had some surprisingly poetical things to say about the Mushroom Kingdom. Check out the video and transcript right here.

Though Nintendo is basically omnipresent at this point (regardless of how much or little money their devices are printing), there are still some unsolved mysteries in the Nintendo universe, and a few mysteries left to create. For instance, have you ever wondered how Bowser has all of those children that first appeared in Super Mario Bros. 3, even though there's never a mention of a wife or mother? Have you happened to wonder why Mario has held a lot of blue collar jobs over the years, but somehow wrangled his way into becoming a doctor once upon a time? The esteemed and kind of insane Shigeru Miyamoto elucidates.

Shigeru Miyamoto was once, and occasionally still shines as, an entertainment genius. He's the father of Mario and Zelda, and has pretty much been Nintendo's creative force ever since he began his work there. Though Nintendo has its ups and downs more than any other console developer in the gaming industry, and even if Nintendo has left a bad taste in your mouth for years, it'd still be pretty difficult to imagine a gaming landscape without Shigeru Miyamoto. In an interview with Wired, Miyamoto revealed that we're one step closer to that kind of landscape, for better or worse, as he stated he is stepping down from his current position at Nintendo and will be focusing on making smaller games.

For the uninitiated, speedrunning is a common practice in the gamer world where people attempt to beat games as quickly and efficiently as possible, leading to some very impressive results. Andrew Gardikis set the Super Mario Bros. speedrunning record at 5 minutes back in 2007, but he couldn't recreate the feat at an event celebrating the 25th anniversary of Super Mario Bros. at Manhattan's Nintendo World Store when Mario creator Shigeru Miyamoto was watching.

A booklet included in the garishly-named Super Mario Collection Special Pack contains Shigeru Miyamoto's original plans for Super Mario Bros., which included Mario flying around with the help of a rocket and having rifles and beam guns available for use.

The iconic classic game designs that we take for granted and seem simple to us today were often the product of tremendous amounts of thought. If you haven't read Nintendo design legend Shigeru Miyamoto's amazing interviews with Nintendo president Satoru Iwata on wii.com, you really should; in this one, he talks about how painstakingly the first level of Super Mario Bros. was engineered to teach the player that mushrooms were good and not bad.

In this vein, Dutch gaming magazine Control has published some neat early sketches of Pac-Man as it was designed by Toru Iwatani. Again, the amount of craft in the graph paper sketches -- really love the football diagram-like arrows depicting the ghosts in motion -- is truly impressive. Note the lack of teleportation gaps from one end of the screen to the other. It's also neat to see the honing involved in determining the precise proportions of our favorite pizza-shaped pill gobbler.

Super Mario Galaxy 2will be released on Sunday (or midnight on Saturday if you're near Rockefeller Center in New York City and want to wait on line for a bit), but the gaming media has had it for some time now. Well, the NDAs are up, and the reviews are in. There have been some worries that this Mario game would be superfluous, unnecessary -- simply Super Mario Galaxy with more levels. This is the first time Nintendo has released two traditional Mario games on one console in 20 years.
Fortunately, according to some of the top publications in gaming journalism, Super Mario Galaxy 2 stands on its own, and much more.
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